ID the Future Intelligent Design, Evolution, and Science Podcast
Author

Ann Gauger

louis pasteur
01.10.2022, Paris France: illustrated Portrait of Louis Pasteur. High quality illustration

The 200th Birthday of Louis Pasteur: A Man of Science and Faith

December 27, 2022 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Louis Pasteur, the French scientist whose scientific breakthroughs have saved millions of lives, and whose work on microbes sounded the death knell of the idea of spontaneous generation. On this episode of ID the Future, biologist Ann Gauger walks listeners through the triumphs, flaws, and tragedies in the life of this extraordinary individual. In the nineteenth century, it was widely believed that the spontaneous generation of life from non-life was common and unremarkable, since it was thought that spontaneous generation of worms, mold, and other life forms occurred all the time in rotting meat and dirty rags. Pasteur constructed an experiment demonstrating that these “spontaneously” arising worms and such Read More ›

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Tropical fishes on the coral reef

Ann Gauger: A Scientist’s Journey into the Intelligent Design Movement

On today’s ID the Future, biologist and intelligent design researcher Ann Gauger tells host Eric Anderson the rest of her story about how she was drawn into the intelligent design movement. The two discuss everything from the challenges she faced making it in a male-dominated field to the evidential power of beauty in the natural world. But how did she end up in the ID movement? After stepping out of a promising career as a research scientist to focus on her family and meeting the needs of an autistic child, she assumed that her life as a scientist was behind her. But then several years later she began reading the work of Darwin skeptics and intelligent design trailblazers—Phillip Johnson, Jonathan Read More ›

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Graceful girl walking with horse and holding reins in hand. Romantic equine and girls silhouette on horse hiking with red rising sun on horizon

Ann Gauger: A Scientist’s Circuitous Journey to Faith

On this ID the Future, host Eric Anderson sits down with biologist and intelligent design proponent Ann Gauger to hear her story of how she got into the intelligent design movement and how the evidence for design has shaped her life. It begins with a lonely girl on a Kansas military base who at one point loses her Christian faith but also discovers the wonders of nature, and friendship, when she is given a horse and begins taking it for long rides in the countryside. Her intellectual journey takes her to MIT, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the University of Washington, and eventually into the Catholic church, where she explores becoming a nun until a conversation with echoes from the Read More ›

Honoring Phillip Johnson Pt. 4: Ann Gauger

On this episode of ID the Future, we hear biologist and Center for Science and Culture senior fellow Ann Gauger speaking at a gathering to honor the recently deceased Dr. Phillip Johnson, the Berkeley law professor known affectionately as the “godfather” of the intelligent design movement.

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New Gene Research: A Single-Couple Human Origin is Possible

On this episode of ID the Future, biologist Ann Gauger talks with host Andrew McDiarmid about new research challenging the common claim that the field of population genetics rules out a single-couple human origin. She and Stockholm University statistical mathematician Ola Hössjer have just published a paper in the journal BIO-Complexity modeling the scenario using a newly developed computer algorithm. The results, Gauger says, show that the genetic data does not rule out Adam and Eve.

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Photo by Mobin Jahantark

Ann Gauger on Emerging Clues to Life’s Design

On this episode of ID the Future, Andrew McDiarmid shares biologist Ann Gauger’s recent article on emerging clues to life’s design, and how the “Darwinian Regime” tends to ignore them. One stubborn bit of biological evidence Gauger highlights is the fact that cells can’t make life-essential ATP, NAD, and other metabolic co-factors without having ATP, NAD, and the other co-factors there first. It’s a “daisy chain of causal circularity woven by what must be an intelligent designer,” Gauger comments. Or as she also puts it, “It’s chickens and eggs, all the way down.”

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Stained glass ceiling of Palace of Catalan Music

Why Scientific Materialism is No Match for Truth, Beauty, and Goodness

On this episode of ID the Future, David Klinghoffer speaks with Dr. Ann Gauger, biologist and Director of Science Communication for Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, about her recent article “The Transcendental Treasury of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness” at EvolutionNews.org. These abstract concepts don’t derive from the material world, yet we feel impoverished without them; they’re foundations of a life worth living. Materialistic evolutionary explanations for truth, beauty, and goodness fall flat. Some of them even reduce them to mere illusion. It takes a designer who knows truth, beauty, and goodness to explain what we all know: They’re really real.

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Zoo visitor at the gorilla enclosure

New Book Refuting Theistic Evolution Puts Ape-to-Man Under the Microscope: Pt. 2

On this episode of ID The Future, we continue a series on human origins with biologist Ann Gauger, CSC Director of Science Communications. Gauger centers her discussion around a big new anthology from Crossway Books that she contributed to and helped edit, Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique. Today’s episode delves into chimp and human DNA. Really, how similar are our genomes? Do protein-coding stretches of DNA tell the whole story? And is there enough time for genetic mutations to build the novelties that separate humans all other primates?

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IDTF-thumbnail

A New Book Refuting Theistic Evolution Puts Ape-to-Man Under the Microscope: Pt. 1

On this episode of ID The Future, we begin a series on human origins with biologist Ann Gauger, CSC Director of Science Communications. Gauger centers her discussion around a big new anthology from Crossway Books that she contributed to and helped edit, Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique. Among the tenets of theistic evolution is the idea that humans evolved from a large population of ape-like creatures. But is that idea scientifically plausible? Today’s episode delves into the fossil evidence. Listen in as Gauger describes not a mere gap in the fossil record but a great gulf, between australopithecines (an ancient ape-like creature) and humans.

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An Overview of Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical and Theological Critique

On this episode of ID The Future, biologist Ann Gauger, CSC Director of Science Communications, discusses a big new anthology she contributed to and helped edit, Theistic Evolution. Gauger discusses the reception that the new book recently received at the Evangelical Theological Society meeting, and gives an overview of the book. In her conversation with host Sarah Chaffee, the two home in on the anthology’s contribution from leading chemist James Tour and the problems that synthetic chemistry pose for modern evolutionary theory. Gauger also summarizes a nano-tech breakthrough Tour’s research team has made in cancer research.